Monday, November 16, 2009

GOOGLE BOOK SETTLEMENT: MAKING SENSE OF THE LITIGATION

This is my first post in an attempt to understand and inform my readers of the Google Book Settlement in which the Author's Guild sued Google for their work to digitize millions of books. According to the court documents available on the Author's Guild resource page, the Author's Guild is "the nation's largest organization of book authors, which has as its primary purpose to advocate for and support the copyright and contractual interest of published writers." On the other hand, in this court document, Google is described as "a major Internet search engine...that provides access to commercial and other sites on the internet."

The crux of the problem seems to be that Google in creating "archives" of books wants to be able to use them as they wish. Unfortunately, this means that Google can "reproduce and retain for its own commercial use a digital copy of the libraries' archives". If I understand it right, Google is digitizing these books and they want to control how the digital archive they are creating is going to be used. And, they want to be sure that if they decide to sell electronic or digital versions of the books they digitize they can do so because they have put in the technology, effort, and manpower to do so.

Obviously, they want to cut out the middle man which is the Author's Guild and here is where the problems start. Everyone wants a piece of this new pie, but no one is willing to share the costs of creating the pie, or the costs of making sure the pie eaters obtain what it is they are looking for as well.

"Compound Memorandum" by James Foley, Illustrated by Chaz Folgar

My Blogged Rating

Teacher in Bronx Looses Shit, Eats Bathroom Pass

Would You Like A Copy of Yago Cura's "Rubberroom?"

If you would like a copy of Yago Cura's Rubberroom, you can purchase one online through the print-on-demand platform at MagCloud. Please click here to access a free digital copy for your e-readers.

The Rubberroom is a colletion of poetry about the reassigment centers that NYC's Department of Education uses to administratively punish teachers that have been arrested or accused of committing a crime.

Yago spent two weeks there in 2004 but was helped along by various people who saw that a wrong was being committed. But, he was extremely lucky; supposedly, there are teachers who have been at these reassignment centers, or Rubberrooms, for years.

Yago's Rubberroom is a cycle of poems written like a play. The plot is driven by acts and scenes and there is one narrator that monologues his way to understanding the motives behind the actions that landed him in the Rubberroom.

Yago's Rubberroom has been passed around public high schools in the Bronx by first year teachers, administrators, and haggard veterans since 2005. In addition, Yago addressed the 2005 and 2006 class of NYC Teaching Fellows at Lehman College, and his story comprises the much larger story titled "Human Resources" that aired on This American Life in February of 2008.

Spicaresque

The title of this web blog is a neologism created by Yago S. Cura: a compound of the derogatory word for Latinos, "spic," and the Spanish literary tradition, "Picaresque," from which the modern novel descends.
Yago's poetry has appeared in Lungfull!, Borderlands, COMBO, LIT, U.S. Latino Review, PALABRA, Exquisite Corpse, Field, Slope, and The New Orleans Review. Yago's reviews have appeared in The St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter.
In 2008, Yago was one of many narrators of the "Human Resources" episode of National Public Radio's "This American Life" that highlighted the NYC/DOE's gulag for alleged-against teachers: the Rubberroom.
Yago's poetry manuscript, Spicaresque, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize.

Spicaresque Slide Show

Porque are you afraid de Spanglish?

"Nothing seems to inflame advocates of our nation's Anglo-Saxon traditions so much as this issue of language. Since a people's culture--it's music, literature, and customs--is invevitably expressed through its language, the growth of 'foreign' language use somehow implied the growth of foreign cultures. Since 1990, for instance, more than 32 million American spoke English as a second language, a phenomenal one-third increase over 1980, and for more than half of those 32 million, Spanish was the primary tongue"